I am temporarily out of town and using a very slow 3G mobile conection, so I cannot really compare with what was the "normal" behaviour before the upgrade. My general impression, though, is that things seem at least as fast as usual. I'll probably be able to check better tomorrow afternoon...

I'm in the Northeast USA. The waiting message does not happen as frequently, maybe once or twice today, but my point is that it should not happen at all. The browser makes the actual connection to the Adobe server in milliseconds, then just sits there waiting for the server to do it's job and serve.

Though I have only been on the new Jive for a very few days, I have not seen those issues, and I am on a Wireless-G on this laptop, though the main connection is high-speed cable. Things seem (no benchmarks) to be about 20% faster, at least for me.

Most of the time (both home & work) I agree that the forum "seems" faster

But, as before the upgrade, things are not faster 100% of the time for 100% of operations (again, both home & work)

But, as I've mentioned before, I've talked to IT where I work, and also read online magazine articles, so I know that a large % (as much as 80% ?) of web traffic is spam, so a new & heavy spambot operation could certainly slow the entire Internet to a crawl at any given time

Delays logging into the forum seem about as bad as they ever were. Clicking login on this page and entering my adobe id/pw, there was about a 10 second delay before I was returned to this page with an active "Reply" button.

I suspect some of this is the horribly slow adobe.com servers involved in the adobe id authentication. I've observed similar nighmarish slowness trying to login to both adobe.com/go/supportportal and also partners.adobe.com.

I don’t have the exact figures available, but we are seeing 4x as many bot/crawler page views in forums as user page views per month.

If so, I would like to hope Jive does something clever to slow down the crawlers so they don't take up precious server resources and slow everything down for the rest of us. Like inserting artificial delays before serving them content, rate-limiting or traffic-shaping them, etc.

Not sure that the servers are located in the Official Adobe Compound, but would assume that they would be close by - maybe the Santa Cruz Mountain version of Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs, CO.

The roundtrip times are not relevant to the problem -- they are in the tens of millseconds, and the delays that users are seeing are measured in seconds (100 times longer than 10ms). That means that the network is not the bottleneck, and is perfectly fine.

Given the round-trip times, measured by ping, the delays shown by traceroute are even less relevant (perhaps that's why you edited out your quip about 1/3 time in Denver). Routers do not respond with ICMP TIME EXCEDED replies (used by traceroute) with the same priority as regular raffic. So you may see cases where the times reported by traceroute are greater than the end-to-end times reported by ping. This is a case of the diagnostic tool giving you misleading (and irrelevant) information. If the round-trip times with ping are satisfactory, as they are, there is no need to look deeper into the network (such as with traceroute), and doing so is just going to confuse and mislead.

But since you ask, for me right now, from Cambridge,MA at MIT to Jive via Sprintlink:

Much more useful information is the time to retrieve a page. It's hard to instrument that as easily, because a brower has to retreive multiple HTTP URLs from different servers to render the page, including the page itself, the css, cookies, Adobe ID crap, images, etc. But if we look at just the base page, it gives you a sense of the time. Unfortunately I don't have a good tool to do that reporting, since curl (to my surprise!) doesn't seem to give the total elapsed stat. But we can fake it well enough with 'time':

We can get some browser stats with Firebug, though, a Firefox extension that lets you look at the network traffic, among other things.

Here's what we get for a simple page load of this thread, without being logged into the site. It actualy takes 8.37 seconds to load everything:

And that's an unauthenticated session. If I try to login, such as to post this reply, it's much much worse, 19.84 seconds. I'm not going to try to pare this one down to fit in 450x600 px, you'll have to click on it to see it all:

Anyhow, no way those 40ms rtts are relevant, even if they were slow (which they're not -- that's limited by the speed of light, really.)

I agree, the IP network isn't the issue. I just posted those times because server locations were being discussed.

I did some additional testing, and I think that the automatic login time is the lion's share of the initial wait to get into the site, and it's QUITE variable.

The computer power you have makes a difference.

Also, the choice of browser can make things seem consistently slow - or snappy. Here are my results:

System: WIndows 7 x64. Times measured to the nearest 0.2 seconds with a stopwatch from hitting return after entering the URL below into the address bar until your table image above was painted. All browsers freshly started to the same home page prior to each test.

As you can see from the numbers above, some browsers work through the same operations quite a bit more quickly than others. This makes my observation that computer speed may be a big factor in the perception of forum speed all the more pertinent.

Subjectively, for me, when something takes more than 2 seconds to display, it feels like it's going a bit long. Under that and I don't notice it.

P.S., here's the measurement to log in and display this page in IE9 64 bit in detail. This goes with the second set of numbers above.

Actually - on your system. It's interesting that people tend to share their own experiences as fact without qualifcation.

For fun I just did some additional tests here on my machine using the IE10 developer preview. This is running in Windows 8 in a VMware virtual machine without access to all my system resources - for one thing the GPU acceleration is nowhere near as good as on my host workstation; for another I also have a second VM booted up at the moment. Also, Microsoft has the Win8/IE10 software laced with logging and telemetry code.

Not logged-in:

IE10 64 bit: 2.4, 2.8, 2.6IE10 32 bit: 2.8, 3.8, 2.8

Logged in automatically after checking "Remember me" during a previous logon process:

IE10 64 bit: 4.2, 4.6, 4.8

IE10 32 bit: 5.8, 6.2, 6.0

Times for logged-in browser to display the discussions list by clicking on the Adobe Forums > Adobe general forums > Forum comments > Discussions link:

IE10 64 bit: 2.2, 2.0, 1.8

IE10 32 bit: 2.4, 2.4, 2.8

Interestingly, IE10 seems to be able to complete the logon process on the Adobe site faster than any other browser I tested.

Next I'm installing Safari 5.1 to see if it's improved on the speed of its predecessor any...

Wow, Apple software is awfully aggressive. I had to carve out all kinds of unwanted stuff (e.g., Bonjour) just after installing their browser.

Safari 5.1 measurements:

Not logged-in:

Safari 5.1 (7534.50): 2.4, 2.0, 2.2

Logged in automatically after checking "Remember me" during a previous logon process:

Safari 5.1 (7534.50): 3.0, 3.4, 3.8

Times for logged-in browser to display the discussions list by clicking on the Adobe Forums > Adobe general forums > Forum comments > Discussions link:

Safari 5.1 (7534.50): 2.0, 2.4, 1.4

I thought perhaps we have a new leader in the browser speed races, at least as far as logging-in here and viewing a thread is concerned, but I tried IE9 64 bit again and got 2.4 second times - that's logged in timing! Maybe Adobe just did something to speed up their login database server?

FYI, though there seemed to be some kind of outage earlier today, now I'm seeing consistent times under 2 seconds getting into the forum initially (including login), then times from under 1 second to 2 seconds navigating from page to page.

Not Jim, but I am seeing ~ 01 sec. for Adobe pages to load/update now (10/08/2011, and as of Noon PDT). However, when I posted this THREAD, times were often up to 05 mins. (longest that I actually timed, though others were in that range too). Things DID get better, so something changed.

I guess I tend to overlook the occasional slowdown, because I understand that maybe things fail, or maybe a system backup is using up some resources, or something. But the implication that Adobe needs new servers needs to be backed up with measurement data. Generally speaking, I'm not seeing long enough delays to make me want to ask them for new server hardware.

But what I *DO* suspect is that the software Jive loads onto the client system (i.e., your computer while browsing the forum) is quite inefficient. Hence the request for timing info along with some idea of the computer power you have (I know you have some pretty good systems, Bill).

On my iPhone it takes an age for any page here to be displayed - 10 seconds or longer! Using the very same fast Internet connection I can bring up the same page on my powerful workstation in 1 to 2 seconds.

This leads me to believe that a large part of the delay many people see is because of inefficient forum scripts running on the client computer.

I tend to think Adobe is penny-pinching and just don't have enough servers to carry the load. Or using antique or archaic equipment. And not using state of the art Output connections (FOIS), or better.

Thank goodness the speed issues are about the only thing we still have issues with.

My own experience some days there are no delays. Then other days, every post can take up nearly a minute to post. Or some not post at all. I end up having to mark as unread and wait for the next day in the hopes Ican read post.

Its either as you say poor scripting by Jive, or the possibility I suggest, or there is simply a break down in one of the server links the post are passed to get from one desination or the other.

I am not advocating ANY change in servers. Right now, things are going pretty well. What I was referring to was the major slowdowns the other day, when it would take up to 5 mins. for a page to load. I would guess that there was either a problem, or that heavy maintenance was being done. Often, we get a notice of such things, but not that time.

Also, it could have been that the gerbil had just run out of food, and the Adobe folk did not realize it, until a day had gone by. Hope that the gerbil lived...

At this moment in time, 10/09/2011, 6:12PM PDT, things are good - don't change a thing! Also, make sure that there is enough Purina™ Gerbil Chow on hand.

I've only received one notice since I have been a Adobforums User/Post (even back to the old system days any notice about maintenace/ Repairs and that was when they were switching to the 4.5.6.3 Jive system.

I tend to think Adobe is penny-pinching and just don't have enough servers to carry the load.

Yes, several quite large blocks of script are transferred from the forum site to your computer. But even small scripts can be inefficient - such is the beauty of object-oriented programming.

While occasional faults can be explained by failures or excessive load, it's all too easy without thinking too hard to blame a server for consistently slow web page response, but if some folks are seeing fast response then it's likely not the server that's at fault!

Good things to know in trying to nail this down would be:

Do you ever see it go fast (as in 1 to 2 second response) or is it consistently slow?

What browser version are you running and how much computer power do you have?

Monday 10-10 response times from clicking a link to full page load is under 2 seconds... nothing changed at my end... so either the 'net in general is a LOT less busy, or the problem was with the Jive servers